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6 total works
A black teen-ager tries valiantly to keep her family together but sees her world collapse as her younger sisters reject her inept mothering.
Ruby Cathy is 18, beautiful, and desperately lonely. Transplanted from her warm, sunny home in the West Indies to crowded, urban Harlem, she is forced to live under her father's stern, unyielding rule after her mother's death, Ruby feels left without friends, without comfort and without love. Then she meets Daphne Duprey, who is "cool, calm, cultured, sophisticated and refined" - everything Ruby is not. Together, Ruby and Daphne build a relationship that gives each young woman a new understanding of strength, friendship and love.
Phyllisia eventually recognizes that her own selfish pride rather than her mother's death and her father's tyrannical behavior created the gulf between her and her best friend.
The disappearance of the seven-year-old daughter of a Brooklyn family casts suspicion on a juvenile offender from Harlem who has recently come to live with them.
Eighteen-year-old Imamu's newly-found contentment, with his job and the apartment he shares with his frail mother, is shattered when he is inadvertently drawn into the sinister events taking place in a wealthy household where he has been delivering groceries.